The Affair of the Stolen Dagger
by What Ithacas Mean
Summary: One summer night in Denerim, Soris learns what his cousin does for a living. Violence and strong language and Kallian Tabris. Part 6: The not-so-grand conclusion.
1. Chapter 1

**title:** "The Affair of the Stolen Dagger, Part 1."

**characters:** Soris, f!Tabris

**rating/warnings**: murder

**summary:** One summer night in Denerim, sixteen-year-old Soris finds out what his cousin does for a living.

8

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><p><em><em> as though the past could be present and memory itself<br>a Baltic honey—__

_chafing at the edges of the seen, a showing off of just how much_  
><em>can be kept safe<em>

_inside a flawed translucence._

_-Eavan Boland, "Amber"_

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><p>8<p>

_1._

If Soris hadn't been drunk - well, _tipsy_was probably the more accurate word - he'd never have followed his cousin Kallian that night.

He never claimed to be smart.

It happened like this:

He and Pol and Pol's brother Tam had spent all the hot, dusty summer day on the quays, running messages, hauling crates whenever the stevedore-crews lacked a man, carrying water. In short, doing whatever kind of work came the way of a trio of adolescent elves, and ducking the back of the stevedores' hands when they didn't run fast enough. Dusk brought the unaccustomed jingle of coppers in their pockets, and Tam - older, more experienced, soon to be married - led them to a tavern's back door to buy a pitcher of ale. _Inside_would be too dangerous, with shems fresh off their ships, full of sailor-pride and spoiling for a fight, but the tavernkeep took their coin and nodded them towards a sheltered corner of the yard.

With a cool breeze ruffling the sweaty spikes of his hair, and - Soris leaned back into the sheltering wall, taking a cautious sip from his tin mug - good dark ale, he didn't mind. Outside might stink of fish from the market and the tiny privy-shack by the west wall, it might be dim and unlit in the gathering twilight, but at least it didn't stink of shems.

"I _am_ going to find the Dalish. Just you see."

"If you want to go looking for fairy tales, go ahead."

Soris let the latest round of Pol and Tam's ongoing argument roll over him. He didn't catch the next exchange of insults. The sight of a familiar figure slipping - with all due care - through the yard gate to hunker down beside the dogcart that rested unhitched and empty beside the privy shack distracted him.

_Kallian? What's she doing here?_

She hadn't seen them, and Pol and Tam were too occupied with their bickering to notice her. The lantern that lit the gate cast a poor light, even with the last streak of sunset in the sky, and the noise of the taverns all along the wharf covered whatever small noises an elf - or three - might make.

He wouldn't have recognised her, but for the fact that - poor orphan relative that he was - he'd shared houseroom with her and her father for the last year. Her stride and the set of her shoulders were as familiar to him as the dirt under his fingernails. But Cyrion Tabris was what passed for _respectable_ in the alienage. Or he had been, until Adaia got herself killed and the shem lord he clerked for turned him off without a character. So what the hell was Cousin Kal doing down by Farrar's Wharf after twilight, dressed all in grey, and crouched where no one stepping across the tavern's yard would spot her until he touched the latch of the jakes - and then not unless he was looking?

Waiting, by the looks of it. Kallian did patient watchfulness like nobody he knew. And it was none of his business, right? _I mean, I didn't see her face, so how do I know for sure it's even really her?_

Soris drank his ale and tried to put it from his mind. When Pol turned the conversation to baiting Tam about his upcoming nuptials, he joined in - _he_ was only sixteen, with at least another three years before the hahren would be considering making a match for him. But his glance kept flicking to the deeper patch of shadow where Kallian crouched, and he found himself watching the handful of men and women who traipsed out to use the jakes with apprehension. None of them noticed Kallian. Only one, a Rivaini whose skin gleamed in the lamplight, even looked towards Soris and his companions.

"More ale?" Tam suggested, when he'd dribbled the last dregs into each of their cups with ferocious concentration.

"Curfew," Soris reminded him. "We need to be sober enough to dodge the shems." An elf outside the alienage after dark without a pass was fair prey for the guards: a night in the cells and a fine being the least you could expect, with a flogging if the fine proved more than you could pay.

"One more jug won't hurt," Pol said. Soris, outnumbered, surrendered with good grace. He was fishing in his belt for the coppers for his share when the tavern's back door opened yet again. A woman balanced on the stoop, surveyed the yard's dimness for a moment, then threaded her way around the worst of the filth towards the jakes. At the door she halted, as though fumbling with the latch - and in that instant Kallian Tabris rose up from the shadows and wrapped an arm around her neck. An arm flashed, the point of a knife driving up between ribs -

It happened so fast, Soris hardly realised what he witnessed. And then it was over, and Kallian - his _cousin_ Kallian - straddled a corpse in the dimness, going through pockets with brisk, silent efficiency.

"Maker's breath," Pol whispered. "Did you _see_that?"

_We have to get out of here,_ Soris thought, as Kallian straightened and walked unhurriedly towards the gate. _Three elves and a shem corpse, that's not a good set of numbers._

_Why?_

"Let's go," Tam said, shakily, an unwitting echo.

_Why, for the Maker's sake?_ The recklessness of burning curiosity seized Soris. Not good for health or self-preservation: the last time he'd felt this way Alarith had ended up thrashing him within an inch of his life. But... "You go," he said, before he could change his mind, and ducked Pol's restraining hand. "I'm going to find out who that was."

He lengthened his stride to reach the gate. Which way? _Left, right -_ There hadn't been time for her to get much head start, but even if his eyes were better than a shem's, the alley was still damned _dark_.

There. A blacker patch of moving shadow, disappearing around a corner. He set off in pursuit.

Three streets he stuck on her tail, dodging the sailors and stevedores who stumbled into - and out of - the lanternlit mouths of raucous taverns. The docks were dangerous for an elf alone at night - you could maybe end up dead or bound for Tevinter if you weren't careful - but he had to _know_.

He rounded the third corner to nothing. In the dimness, with warehouses hemming him in on both sides, not even a whisper of motion reached his eyes. He took a step into the street, peering, straining his ears -

A brass knuckle hit him in the kidney. Hard hands trapped his elbow, spun him around, slammed him up against a doorway. Splintery wood bit into his cheek. He didn't fight - struggling'd only break his elbow, by that grip - but when the point of a knife touched his nape, fear turned him limp as wet rags.

"Who are you," said his cousin's voice, quiet and vicious, "and why are you following me?"

"Kallian?" It sounded like Kallian. It _smelled_ like Kallian, camphor and leather and sweat. "I - I'm sorry. It's me."

A long moment's silence. "Soris?"

He swallowed. "That's me."

"Andraste's flaming -" In a tone of utter disgust: "You're lucky you're family, Soris. Because sometimes you really _do _have nothing in your head but air."

Released, he turned to face her, gingerly fingering the soft flesh at the back of his neck where the knife had pricked. His stomach did somersaults, but he made his voice light. "So, um. New hobby?"

The set of her shoulders held nothing but hard tension. He could tell that much even in the dimness. "How much did you see?"

"We were drinking in the yard -"

"We?"

"Pol and Tam and me."

"Shit," she muttered. "Fucking _shit_."

His throat was dry. "I don't think they knew it was you, though. I mean, what the hell, Kal? You're killing people now?"

"Go home, Soris," she said, soft and weary. "Go home, and forget you saw anything."

"No." For the second time that night, Soris surprised himself. He firmed his tone. Maybe she wouldn't realise he was frightened down to the soles of his bare feet. For her, yes, but also _of_ her. "You're my cousin, Kal. Whatever you're into, it's dangerous. You need someone to watch your back."

He braced for an argument - _Maker_, what was he _thinking?_ - but Kal just tilted her head. "Soris..." A heavy exhalation. He could _feel_ her weighing him up against whatever unknown set of scales she held in her mind. "Okay," she said after a moment, quietly. "But if you do this, Soris, you're all the way in. No questions, no comments: you keep your mouth shut and do _exactly_ what I tell you. Understood?"

_Maker, what am I getting myself into?_ "I understand."

"Damn well better," she muttered, and tugged him to follow.

* * *

><p>More alleys, leading away from the wharves. Soris could feel Kallian's unease in the tight pinch of her fingers on his wrist. She flinched when a cat yowled and knocked over a pile of detritus with a clatter, and when she slipped her knife away he realised he'd never seen her draw it.<p>

"Here." Outside a narrow door on Threadneedle Street, between a bookbinder's and a grocer's, his cousin halted. She rapped four times on the peeling wood, waited a heartbeat, rapped four times more, and pushed it open without waiting for a reply.

Lamplight dazzled after the street's blackness. Soris blinked and knuckled his eyes. Two men sat playing cards at a low trestle table. A human and a dwarf - the human middle-aged and stubbled, with the tabard of the city guard slung over the back of his chair, the dwarf with a cocked crossbow resting on his knee and an ugly brand scarring his cheek. The guardsman raised his eyebrows. "You brought a friend, Tabris?"

"He's family." Kallian leaned against the doorframe and met his gaze steadily, with none of the cowed deference he'd expect her to show a shem guardsmen - Maker, a shem guard _sergeant,_ by his sash. "And I'm going to need another pair of hands, since Faith the Cope wasn't carrying the merchandise."

"Damn," the shem said, mildly. "We know she had to have had it this morning. Which means she's either stashed it somewhere, or -"

"Or she's sold it already." Kallian's tone was challenging. "She didn't break her routine, though. Went to Mallory's this evening just like usual."

"My people are watching the Tevinters," the dwarf said. He chewed the end of his beard. "No sign of anything new with them. But hold a moment. You brought this boy _here_?"

"Family," Kallian said again, with an edge of warning in her voice. Soris shrank back, nerves bilious in his gut, as she stepped in front of him. Shielding him.

"Leave it, Rikor," the shem said in the same moment. The two men, dwarf and shem, exchanged a glance. The shem said smoothly, the way that fine steel was smooth, "Tabris' word is good with me."

The dwarf - Rikor - grunted. It seemed to pass for agreement, because the shem inclined his head, and Kallian visibly relaxed.

"Fine," the shem said. "We don't have much time if we're going to keep the templars out of this. Tabris, you and your friend go search her rooms. Backtrack to Mallory's if you have to. I'll go knock over some fences and see what falls out. Rikor?"

The dwarf spat. "The sodding Tevinters won't go swanning off home with _that_ particular bit of pretty on my watch."

"Good." The shem flipped a brass token to Kallian. "There's a night pass. Go."

Kallian seized Soris's arm and they went.

_Templars? Tevinters?_ "Kal?" he said uncertainly, as they trailed through the dark untrafficked streets of the Tanneries. "What's going on?"

"Didn't I say not to ask questions?" No sting in her voice.

"You could at least tell me what sort of shit I've landed in!"

She stopped. Her grip on his shoulder ground muscle against bone. "The dangerous kind, Soris. You were right. I need someone to watch my back. And it shouldn't be you, because-" savage "-this is _dangerous_. I trust Herrian - the sergeant - but he's as bent as two copper pins, and he owes Rikor. And I don't trust Rikor as far as I can throw him."

"I'm what you've got," Soris said, carefully. "Tell me what's going on, Kal?"

A gusty sigh. "Okay. But keep walking. Herrian was right that we don't have much time." And after a moment, soft and low, barely loud enough to hear above their footsteps on the packed earth: "Rikor runs the glimmer trade - illegal enchantments, lyrium smuggling, theft, you name it, if it's got magic in it, he deals in it. This fool of a shem, Faith the Cope, ripped off one of the Grand Cleric's enchanted pretties without cutting him in. Worse luck, it's actually something the templars will come down pretty hard to get back - so I'm told - so it has to go back, because seriously pissed-off templars are not healthy for someone in Rikor's line of work. They tend to stab first and ask questions later. So Rikor can't bring his own people in - hunting down the thief's one thing, but handing back the merchandise makes him look weak, and if he looks weak, one of his own people will jump him."

"The woman you... killed." Soris swallowed. "She was the thief?"

"She's not the first," his cousin said, her tone flat and distant. "She won't be the last, either, Soris."

"Why are you _doing_ this?" The question burst past the lump in his throat. His cousin wasn't a killer, a hired murderer - _couldn't _be.

"Because Herrian owes Rikor, and I owe Herrian." There was no emotion in her voice. "And because I'm good at it."

"Uncle Cyrion -" _Would never allow this_.

"Is barely," she said, still flat, "able to put food on the table for _himself._ I have to think about -" She cut herself short. More softly: "Shianni's nearly fifteen."

His - their - cousin Shianni, another orphan. Since her mother and brothers died in the summer plague last year, like him she'd lived under Cyrion Tabris' roof. "So?" he said, groping for understanding.

"She's too pretty to be safe in service," Kallian said quietly. "Too careless - too _angry_- to last on her own for very long as a thief, and far, far too honest to make a whore. She doesn't have a chance, unless I can raise a prentice-fee for her. She's deft enough to make a dressmaker."

"Oh." He was obscurely comforted. At least his cousin had a _reason_. "What about me?"

"You're the wrong kind of pretty for most sorts of trouble." She sighed. "Da doesn't know. He's guessed that I'm running as someone's muscle, but he doesn't know that I've done murder out of it. So don't tell him, okay?"

"Cousin -" Soris shook his head. _Murder. Maker's breath._ "I have your back."

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><p>8<p>

_Possibly a play in three acts. Comments would make me happy. Particularly constructive criticism!_


	2. Chapter 2

**title:** "The Affair of the Stolen Dagger, Part 2."

**characters:** Soris, f!Tabris

**rating/warnings:** murder, off-screen torture

**summary:** One summer night in Denerim, sixteen-year-old Soris finds out what his cousin does for a living.

8

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><p>8<p>

_2._

The thief had rooms in a lodging-house off Copperman's Circle, a stone's throw from the river. Soris would've gone to the door, but Kallian's tug on his elbow stopped him. "What?" he asked.

She led him around to a side alley and gestured at a shuttered second-storey window. "That's her room," she said, a breath of air beside his ear. "Give me a boost up, and I'll get us in."

He braced his back against the brick wall and made a stirrup of his hands. Her bare foot pressed cold against his palm. He grunted - she was _heavy_ - and heaved her up.

She balanced in the window embrasure for a heart-stoppingly long moment. When the shutter latch popped, she disappeared inside in a lithe slither, reappearing after a second with a length of rope secured for him to climb.

"Stay quiet," she said, soft, when his feet touched the boards beside her. "We can risk a lamp, I think, but if we wake the landlady she'll come looking. And I'd rather not have to kill her."

Her tone told him she was serious. "Have I mentioned that you're bloody terrifying?" Soris said, under his breath.

There was the click of a striker. Light flared from a lamp beside the heavy wooden bedstead, revealing a narrow cluttered room and Kallian's feral grin. "Not lately."

_Maker's breath, she's enjoying this_.

"What -" He coughed, lowered his voice to a whisper. "What are we looking for?"

"A dagger. Gold-chased hilt with blue inlay, Tevinter runes on the blade." Her tone was absent, distracted. She pinched the bridge of her nose, surveying the room with an intent expression, then shook her head impatiently. "Check the clotheschest and the mattress. I'm going to see if I can find a hideyhole in the floorboards or the walls."

The chest, a chunky iron-bound thing squatted beside the bed, wasn't latched. The lid lifted easily, revealing that Faith-the-thief hadn't been particularly fastidious about her laundy. Soris wrinkled his nose. _You asked for it, Sor,_ he reminded himself, and started rumaging through sweaty shirts and smalls. Behind him, Kallian commenced a delicate tapping.

The chest held a wealth of fabric. It was a shame to see good wool and linen treated so poorly. Particularly - Soris tucked his tongue between his teeth, grimacing - particularly if, like him, you had all of three shirts to your name. _One to wash, one to wear, one for feast days and pretty girls_, as his years-dead granther used to say. He frowned. Maybe he could take one when they left. The dead woman - his hands stilled, remembering - the dead woman would hardly be needing them again. _Forgive me, holy Andraste, but I could really_ use _another shirt without holes_ -

From downstairs, the sound of an abruptly-silenced scream cut off his guilty prayer.

"Soris." Kallian, at his shoulder faster than he could turn his head. The knife in her white-knuckled grip as much as the hard urgency in her voice sent ice churning in his gut. "Hide. Now."

"But -" _What about you?_

Brutally, she shoved him, the light in her eyes fierce and afraid. "No time to run. Get under the bed and whatever happens _stay quiet_."

Sick and scared, he obeyed, rolling under the heavy bedstead - its counterpane trailed the floor - into a small mountain of accumulated dust. Kallian's feet settled on the scarred wooden boards, shoulder-spaced, weight balanced and light. He stared at her grimed ankles, the ragged ends of her trousers, and tried to calm the heartbeat thundering in his ears.

The door slammed open. Kallian twitched - and gasped.

Only one set of footsteps. The wooden boards creaked. Soris breathed shallowly and tried not to sneeze. Tried not to _think_ about sneezing.

_Andraste, preserve me. Please._

In a strained voice, hitched with pain, his cousin said, "I'm guessing you're a mage."

"Good guess," said a strange woman's voice. She sounded amused. "Don't bother trying to move, by the way. That spell isn't called a glyph of paralysis for nothing."

"Tevinter?"

The woman chuckled. The sound reminded Soris of a snake, hissing. "Pure homegrown apostate, sweetheart. But I work for the highest bidder, and right now the highest bidder wants to know what happened to a certain dagger and the thief who was supposed to deliver it."

"I don't know what you're talking about," his cousin said, steadily.

"Sweetheart." Snake-woman gave an exaggerated sigh. Her boots, tasselled calfskin, came into Soris's narrow range of vision in the gap between the counterpane and the floor. "I don't have time to play games. You're not Faith the Cope, so you're here working for someone else. Just tell me what happened to the Cope and the dagger, and - as a courtesy between professionals - I'll even let you go, afterwards."

Something was sticking into Soris's hip, an edge of wood. He shifted. It clicked. He froze.

The click had been lost in Kallian's reply. "I still don't know what you're talking about. Unless you have silver. Silver always helps me think more clearly."

The woman snorted. "Oh, you're a brazen one. But like I said, I don't have time for games. Nothing personal, sweetheart, but if you don't tell me, I'm going to have to hurt you."

"Nothing personal," Kallian said, somewhere between mocking and resigned. "But go fuck a donkey."

Soris slid his hand down to his hip. A section of floorboard moved aside under his questing fingers. Emptiness. A cloth-wrapped hardness.

"Don't say I didn't warn you," the woman said mildly. Purple light flashed.

His cousin grunted, drew a ragged breath. "I don't sell out for free," she said. But there was a shaky edge in her voice.

Soris unwrapped the cloth bundle carefully, inch by inch. _Maker, please -_ The air crackled. Kallian screamed. "Sweetheart," snake-woman said, almost gently, "this is only the start of what I can do to you. Think about it."

Soris found hard, sharp metal under his fingers. The dagger. He gripped the hilt. He'd only have one chance. _Maker, what am I thinking?_ But he _had_ to. He had to wait until the woman came close enough to the bed that he could cripple her with one blow. The back of the knees would do, or the inner thigh where the big vein pressed against the skin. Take her down, grab Kal, and run -

He squeezed his eyes shut. _I'm not a killer. Maker, please -_

Not that the Maker ever listened.

He waited for his opportunity. Kallian's screams turned his ears raw. After an eternity - it felt like an eternity, but it couldn't have been more than an hour - Soris saw his chance.

Kallian's screams had changed to small pained noises deep in her throat. The woman stepped closer to his cousin - her heels within inches of the bed - voice a comforting croon. "Ssh, sweetheart. Tell me and I'll stop. Don't be so stubborn, hmm? Just tell me."

Soris struck.

The dagger slid into the back of the woman's knee like a hot wire through butter. Silver light flared from the blade. She yowled like a trodden cat and in panic he stabbed again, throwing himself out from under the bed's claustrophobic confines. He rolled into her ankles, and she collapsed on top of him, a tangle of limbs that drove the breath from his chest. Before he could think about what he was doing - _Andraste_ - he lashed out with the dagger again.

Steel ground on bone. Hot wetness drenched his hands. Wild and terrified, he scrambled out from underneath her, expecting the red bloom of magic fire to eat the flesh from his bones at any instant -

She didn't move. She lay there, sprawled limbs in gaudy wool, and it wasn't until he saw the spreading pool of blood underneath her ribs that he realised she was dead.

_She's dead. And I killed her._

"Well done," his cousin said, in a voice like death. Grey-faced, her shirt damp with sweat, she braced herself on the foot of the bed as though it took all her strength just to stand. And looked at him with a calmness that astonished him. "You all right?"

_Am _I_ all right?_ he thought, half sick, half furious. His vision blurred. Maker's breath, was he _crying_?

"Hey." A rustle, and Kallian's arms enfolded him. "You did what you had to do, Soris," she said, quietly. "She was going to kill me."

"Andraste's frilly underwear, why didn't you just tell her what she wanted to hear?" Soris pulled back and glared at her through his shakes. "Do you owe the bloody shem _that_ much?"

Her shrug turned into a wince. "If she got what she wanted from me, she'd've only killed me that much quicker. For what it's worth..." A sigh. "For what it's worth, Sor, I'm sorry it came down to you."

"_You're_ sorry? I -" He exhaled and met her waiting glance. "I'm glad you're not dead, Cousin."

She seemed to take this as a signal to change the subject - which was good, because he really didn't _want_ to think about the dead woman on the floor or the pained tightness at the corner of his cousin's eyes - and nodded to the dagger. "You find that under the bed?"

"Under the floorboards. But -" He looked down at it, bloody in his grip. _So much for not thinking about it_.

"Good. Give it here." He surrendered it, and she eyed it briefly, sucking on her split bottom lip, before tucking it into her belt. "No wonder the templars want it back. It's enchanted against mages." She gave the corpse a disgusted look. "She must have done something to keep the neighbours from hearing, but we've got what we came for. No point hanging around."

"What about -?" He jerked his chin at the body, and swallowed.

Kallian regarded him with a certain weary compassion. "You saved my life. It gets easier. Just... try not to think about it too much."

He snorted. "Yeah. Right."

Noise from the street drove the crooked half-smile from her lips. Booted feet tromping in step and the rattle of armour. "_Shit._" She gestured him to the window, doused the lamp. "_Jump_, damn it."

Soris landed awkwardly on the packed earth, Kallian hard on his heels. She recovered fast, peered around the corner into the street, and darted back to his side to yank him deeper into the alleyway. "Templars," she murmured, a breath of sound in his ear. "Thank the Maker they don't know the meaning of _subtle_." And when he pulled up short: "Keep moving, blight you, unless you _want_ to get caught."

He kept moving. "How - how did they know?"

"Good question." Grim. "I'd say the Cope got careless, except for the fact that Herrian said the templars shouldn't _officially_ miss our pretty dagger till morning. Could be that bloody mage got careless, but if she was careless she'd never have lasted very long as an apostate-for-hire - and I've seen her face before."

"Where?"

Silence. Then, in a reluctant whisper: "Rikor."

8

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><p>8<p>

_And somehow, I need to figure out how to stick the dismount. Templars, Tevinters, apostates-for-hire, crimebosses and guard sergeants on the take. Who's selling out who?_


	3. Chapter 3

**title:** "The Affair of the Stolen Dagger, Part 3."

**characters:** Soris, f!Tabris

**summary:** One summer night in Denerim, sixteen-year-old Soris finds out what his cousin does for a living.

* * *

><p><em>AN: I've been offline for a long time, and I'm likely to stay that way. But I'm trying to finish at least *this* fic before winter.<br>_

* * *

><p>Soris hugged the shadows behind Kallian as his cousin led them carefully through the dark streets of Denerim towards the river, away from the templars' lit torches and the rattle of armour. The apostate's blood dried sticky on his hands, flaking when he closed his fists. He tried to take Kallian's advice - tried not to think about it, to put it out of his mind - but he found himself prodding at it over and over, like running his tongue over the bloody stub of a broken tooth. The shock of the mage's dying, the convulsive shudder of her body -<p>

He dragged his thoughts away as Kallian ducked down the narrow shit-slimed stone walk under the North Bridge and stopped, leaning up against the lichened brickwork. "What now?" he said, quietly.

"I don't know." The river slapped at the piles of the bridge, murky and reeking with the summer-stench of the city's waste. His cousin slapped the wall once, and again twice, shoulders knotted tense and angry. "It doesn't make _sense_, Soris. I thought I knew the players here. Faith the Cope wouldn't have stolen anything without having a buyer for it. And Rikor and the Tevinters are the only buyers in town for shit like this" - she touched the dagger at her belt - "at least, the only buyers I would've thought the Cope had the contacts to get in touch with. The Tevinters wouldn't have needed to hire a local apostate to track the Cope down when they've mages of their own, and I know I've seen her at Rikor's - but in that case, Rikor'd no need of _me_, did he? And he's not the kind to call in his markers without need."

"So?" Soris asked. He wanted desperately to keep the edge of fear out of his voice. He didn't quite think he managed it.

"That means someone else knows the dagger's been stolen." Kallian's tone was grim. "Someone who wants it and has the stones and the coin to hire mages. Let's assume they're halfway competent. And _that_ means they have to have eyes on Rikor."

"What're you going to do?"

"Be very, very careful," his cousin said, softly. "And be ready to run like hell."

8

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><p>Rikor's place was dark, the door broken open and hanging splintered from its hinges. Even from halfway down the street, Soris could smell blood, rich and coppery, and bowel-stink of death. Kallian cursed under her breath, low and vicious. "Stay here. If you hear anything, run. Understand?"<p>

He ducked his chin, swallowing past the knot in his throat. She was gone before he could say a word, slipping from shadow to deeper blackness. He pressed back up the nearest wall, crumbling brickwork sharp against his spine. _Andraste preserve us. Please._

He hoped that Andraste listened to the prayers of elves. He really did.

A whisper of motion against the darkness, and Kallian reappeared at his side as silently as she'd left. "So much for Rikor," she murmured, cold and grim. "We need to go."

"Dead?"

"Oh, very definitely." She tugged him back and into the nearest alley. "Someone was keeping watch inside. He won't be reporting to anyone, but I'd just as soon not hang around to see if anyone comes to check up on him. Blight it, this was supposed to be straightforward, not a Maker-be-damned bloody mess."

Soris swallowed. "What are we going to do?"

"_We_ aren't doing anything." Kallian laid her hand on his shoulder, a gentleness at odds with the harshness of her voice. "_You're_ going to wash the blood off and go home. _I'm_ going to go to ground and wait for the dust to settle, just in case someone's fingered me as one of Rikor's prigs."

"But -" _But,_ he wanted to say. _But you're my cousin. But I'm afraid for you._

_But I just killed someone. But what am I supposed to _do_?_

"Sor, you've been dragged into danger enough already. Please. Go home. Be safe."

He closed his teeth on his protest. Stubborn as a mule, his cousin. He wasn't going to be able to change her mind. "Okay," he said, softly. "But you be safe, too."

Her hands under his bare feet boosted him up over the rough brickwork of the alienage wall. Straddling the top, he glanced back down at her upturned face, a paler splash in the darkness.

He didn't see her again for four days.

* * *

><p>8<p>

Templars and clerics, high-profile thefts and civic outrage: these things touched the alienage only indirectly. The guardsmen who patrolled - irregularly, with a bullying swagger - through the open drains of the alienage's streets - patrolled less frequently. Rumour had it their rosters had changed to cover other guardsmen, breaking down doors in the docks and the rookeries of Easttown, searching wagons, playing second fiddle to blank-helmeted templars and the Grand Cleric's pair of tame mages. But the search didn't come to the alienage itself. The shems, Soris supposed, probably didn't think elves were _smart_ enough to steal from the Chantry.

Or perhaps they thought an elf would be smart enough to realise if they were caught, the whole alienage would suffer.

He kept his head down and his mouth shut, and tried not to fret about Kallian where anyone could see him.

On the morning of the third day, he was sharing a breakfast of thin oatmeal porridge in Cyrion Tabris's kitchen, trying to ease the older man's worry without revealing any of his own, when the tiny elf-woman who cleaned the guard barracks at Denerim Market came to tell the elder Tabris that his daughter had been arrested.


	4. Chapter 4

**title:** "The Affair of the Stolen Dagger, Part 4."

**characters:** Soris, f!Tabris

**summary:** Soris is summoned to a prison.

8

* * *

><p>8<p>

The Market Gaol wasn't Fort Drakon. The Fort was for nobles and traitors, prisoners too valuable to hang and too dangerous to release. Not for elves and beggars and petty thieves.

A huddle of slit-windowed brick buildings behind the guard barracks, the Market Gaol had been magistrates' chambers before the Orlesian occupation. The Orlesians had built a new, magnificent residence for the market magistrates in granite and marble beside the chantry, and their old buildings stood empty for year before the then arl of Denerim deeded the site over to the guildmasters and burghers of the city, to replace the ramshackle prison at Lorimer Gate. Its crowded cells housed debtors and felons, beggars and elves caught outside the alienage after curfew, sometimes ten or twelve to each ten foot by ten foot cell.

Soris eyed the dark maw of its gate - flanked by watchful sentries in the armour of the city guard - with trepidation. He'd never been inside, not ever, but he'd heard stories. Gaol fever and the red plague carried off more inmates than the gallows ever touched. Pol's cousin Oren said he'd shared a cell with six men and two corpses, before he did his stint in the pillory. Those who couldn't pay garnish - and what elf could? - to the keepers had to wear heavy shackles. And there were always rumours about shem men paying for access to the women's side...

Cyrion couldn't come: he actually had paying work this week. Shianni's temper was far too volatile to risk her with the shems, and most of the rest of Tabris' kin were either dead or, after what had happened with Adaia, determined to be respectable regardless of the cost. Which left Soris as the only person who could - or would - answer the message Kallian had been able to send.

Gathering his courage - and ignoring the little voice that whispered _But what if they don't let me back out?_ - he crossed to the gate. The guards watched him boredly. He swallowed on a dry throat, kept his gaze on their boots. You didn't look a shem in the eye, especially not a guardsman. Not if you wanted to keep all your teeth. "I'm here to see Sergeant Herrian, please ser," he said to the slightly shorter one.

"And does Sergeant Herrian want to see you, boy?" The short one still stood a full head taller than Soris. He shifted his weight, leaning on his pike, and spat to his left, barely missing Soris's foot.

"He sent for me, ser." Soris held his hands loose and open at his sides. Inside he was a tight twisted knot of apprehension, but he didn't have to let it show. It surprised him, that he had begun to find it easier to keep the edge of fear from his voice: that all he had to do was think of Kallian's crooked half-smile in a face grey with strain and the aftermath of torment, the wry twist to her mouth as she said, _For what it's worth, I'm sorry, _and he could hold the veneer of calmness in front of him like a shield.

Borrowed courage, but it would do.

The guard spat again. "You got a name, boy?"

"Soris, ser."

Shorty propped his pike against the wall with an aggrieved sigh and leaned back inside the gate. "Maric! Knife-ear to see the sergeant, Soris 'e says 'is name is. Run and tell 'im." To Soris, he added, not unpleasantly, "You may as well 'unker down to wait, boy. Sergeant's a busy man, and 'e ain't like to 'urry."

"Thank you," Soris said, politely, and squatted down in the dust beside the gatehouse as the guardsman reclaimed his pike.

Shorty, as it turned out, found himself mistaken. Sergeant Herrian arrived within moments. "Come," he growled and jerked his head - without a word to the guardsmen by the gate - as Soris scrambled to his feet.

The gaol's slit-windowed buildings overshadowed its narrow courtyard, blocking out the sun. A handful of guardsmen loitered on the main steps. The sergeant brushed past them with a bare acknowledgement. They passed down a dimly-lit corridor, reeking of shit and urine, and the sergeant's callused hand seized Soris's collar, pulling him around a blind corner into the privacy of a bricked-up window embrasure.

"Your cousin," the sergeant said, quiet and hard and close enough that the reek of onions on his breath almost made Soris gag, "Your cousin says she never found it, understand?"

No need to ask what _it_ was. Soris ducked his chin, but the sergeant had already gone on.

"I don't need to know if she's lying - I don't _want_ to know - but either way, right now, gaol is the safest place she can be. There are far too many people interested in that damn thing, and with Rikor dead, I have no way to keep a handle on what's going on in the glimmer trade. Hell, with him dead, no one knows which way the glimmer trade is running. It's a right bloody mess, and there's a limit to what I can do without making my interest in your cousin dangerously plain. So I can get her easement of irons and a cell to herself, but she'll still pick up a whipping for getting caught out after curfew with a weapon on her. The lads will tolerate a sergeant with a friend or two in the alienage or along the docks, but officers are a different matter." His harsh voice sounded almost apologetic, in a grim sort of way. "So whatever she's going to ask you to do, remember, no one's going to have your back. You understand me, kid?"

"I understand." Soris reached for his borrowed courage. No one would have his back? _And who has Kallian's back, if I back down?_ She was his cousin. Blood meant something. It had to.

And besides, he had his curiosity to satisfy.

Herrian grunted. "As long as you do." He jerked his head. "Well, come along, then."

Through a half-empty guardroom, the corridor ended in a slightly wider oval. Wood benches framed an empty fireplace. A bearded man in a blank grey tabard lounged by a barred door. "Visitor for the prisoner in seven," the sergeant said, his hand resting heavy on Soris's shoulder. And added, sharp: "And watch you mind your tricks, Ceorlic. Shake down the Northwatch's birds all you like, but you leave mine alone without my say-so, hear?"

Ceorlic stood lazily, scratching his nose with a ragged fingernail. Keys jangled at his belt. "It ain't visiting hours. Getting soft in your old age, Sergeant?"

The sergeant shrugged, broad shoulders flexing under his mail. "Honey catches more flies, Ceorlic," he said, blandly. "Didn't your mama ever tell you that?" Without altering his tone: "And if you call me soft again, you pissant excuse of a blight-rotted man, I'll make you eat more than your words."

His fingers dug into Soris's shoulder to the bone. Soris's throat went dry. Drier, at least, than it had already been. _I think he means it._

He didn't shudder, though he wanted to.

"Fine," the other man said, gracelessly, moving to unlock the barred door - hastily, despite the ill temper in his voice. "I'll treat him gentle." To Soris: "You going to stand there, boy, or are you going to come?"

"You can tell your cousin she owes me," Herrian said, dryly, the ghost of encouragement in his eyes. "Now get moving, kid."

Soris went.

The grey-tabarded man - belatedly, Soris realised he must be one of the gaol's keepers - led him down another dank brick hall, past bolted wooden doors and another pair of guards leaning on their pikes, sleepy-eyed in the dim light. The stink of nightsoil, mould and rot - rank as a sewer, and stronger - filled the air. Soris fought the urge to cough.

The gaolkeeper stopped a few feet beyond the guards, in front of another plain locked wooden door. A moment's fumbling with the keys unlocked it. "In," he said, brusquely. "I'll be back in a half-turn of the glass. That's how long you have."

_What if you don't come back to let me out?_ But he didn't let his apprehension show. Instead: "Thank you, ser," Soris said, as carefully polite as he'd ever been taught to be around shems, and tried not to flinch when the keeper slammed the door behind him. The rattle of the bolts drawing home sent shudders down his spine.

A figure unfolded itself stiffly from one corner in the dim light of the single slit window. "I wasn't sure you'd come," Kallian said, quietly, and lifted her head to meet his eyes.


	5. Chapter 5

**title:** "The Affair of the Stolen Dagger, Part 5."

**characters:** Soris, f!Tabris

**summary:** One summer night in Denerim, sixteen-year-old Soris finds out what his cousin does for a living. Part 5: What Kallian did with the dagger.

8

"Of course I came." Soris made his tone light, wry. "Your Da and Shianni send their love. Well, your Da does, anyway. I'm sure Shianni _would _have sent hers - if she'd managed to stop telling me what an idiot you were to get caught out after curfew long enough to say anything else."

"That's our Shianni." Kallian stepped into the fall of light from the windowslit, amusement in her voice. A thin length of chain shackled her wrists together, clinking as she shifted her weight. A bruise puffed her right cheek, the livid print of a gauntleted fist, and the tail of her shirt was stained with blood.

Despite himself, Soris caught his breath. "Are you hurt?"

Kallian followed the direction of his worried glance and grimaced. "Not worth mentioning. Shianni's right, you know. I was an idiot to get caught. I got careless, since everything else was going so well."

The cell reeked of damp mould and the noisome stench of the privy bucket propped lidless in the corner. Soris eased closer to Kallain and put a tentative arm around her shoulders, relaxing a little when she leaned into the curve of his shoulder. She wasn't a demonstrative person: he'd half expected to be told to back off, keep his distance. "Did you" - he lowered his voice - "Did you get rid of the dagger?"

"Almost," she murmured, equally soft. "I found out who else wants it. That's why I asked you to come."

"Who?"

"The arl of Amaranthine's eldest son. Lord Thomas Howe."

"What?" Soris jerked back. "A Maker-be-damned _noble_?"

"Yes, a noble." She glared at him. "And keep your voice _down_, Cousin. We don't have much time. Howe thinks the Tevinters have it. The Tevinters think Howe has it. The Templars, as far as I can tell, haven't the first clue who _might _have it. Probably I should've thrown the damn thing in the river… but I didn't."

"What," Soris asked carefully, not without a certain amount of trepidation, "_did_ you do?"

"Look, before you judge me, the thing's worth at least five sovereigns. Think about what you could do with that. _Think_, Sor, what a difference gold makes. Gold can buy you out of trouble like" - the chain truncated her sweeping gesture - "like this. I arranged things so that the Tevinters think Howe is going to sell them the dagger, but _I_ was the one who was going to make the exchange."

_Not exactly lying low_. Not that he could blame her. Kallian had never been one to flinch from opportunity. "And you want me to - what, take your place?"

She grimaced. "If you're willing. Slim Couldry's brokering the meet: all you'd have to do is let him know you have the merchandise and show up to finish the deal. I'll tell you where I hid it, and you'll want to take someone to watch your back. Couldry might be a decent sort for a fence, but there's money involved, and that can always complicate things."

_Willing?_ "Um," Soris said. "Kallian, I don't want to let you down, but..."

"Soris." She caught his wrist with one callused hand, grip strong enough to grind the small bones together. Hot and dry, her fingers pressed painfully into his flesh. In the dimness her eyes were hard and bright and unexpectedly afraid. "They're going to fucking flog me at the tail of a cart from the north of the Market to the alienage gate. If I don't heal clean, I mightn't be able to work again for _months_. This could be my last chance at real money for a good long while."

_Or ever._ She didn't say it, but Soris heard it anyway. The alienage had its fair share of men and women who'd had their ribs broken by a shem wielding a cane instead of a whip, and never healed right, or who'd been carried off by fever in the wake of a flogging.

"Kallian," he said, gently, covering her painful fingers with his free hand. "You're hurting me."

"Sorry." She exhaled, shakily. She let him go and turned away, her profile a stark contrast of light and shadows, skin drawn taut over jutting bone. "You've taken enough risks already."

Bitterly, in that moment, he hated her. Hated her as much as he hated the shems who'd forced his cousin to choose between swallowing her pride and licking boots for the leavings from their tables, being a _good _elf, respectful and obedient, quiet and subservient, above all never _angry_; or risking her life to fight for scraps, a killer and a thief, feral and frightening. He hated her for making him complicit even as she tried to shield him; hated her for the memory of blood on his hands. Hated her for her daring, when every instinct in his being told him a cowardly elf would live a great deal longer.

"I'll do it," he said, through the copper taste of fear that flooded his mouth.

#

8

#

The problem, Soris thought later, was that really there wasn't anyone he'd trust to watch his back. Not anyone who'd be any good in a fight, at least. In the end, he came down on the side of trust, and asked Pol to keep an eye on things from a couple of streets away. _At least_, he consoled himself mordantly, _he'll be able to tell someone if I get my fool self killed._

Couldry - an affable man with an endless store of small-talk and a surprising amount of muscle beneath his spreading gut - had set up the meeting for midday the following day, in the back room of a respectable inn in one of the streets off the Market square. The Copper Dove catered to a quieter, less expensive clientele than the Gnawed Noble. A trade - even between an elf and a Tevinter - would draw few eyes.

_Tevinters._ Soris shuddered, patting the package - retrieved from a storm drain beside a cartwright's shop near the docks - tucked under his shirt as he brushed through the Dove's side door. _Bloody slavers. _There was only supposed to be one of them at the exchange, a merchant's factor called Mavros. Couldry had men keeping watch on the tavern to make sure things stayed fair and that they weren't interrupted, a service for which, Kallian had told him, she'd agreed to give him a full fifth of the coin the Tevinters had offered to pay.

The tavern smelled of old beer, pipesmoke, and good cooking. Soris ducked his head to the barkeep in passing, and pushed open the door to the back room.

A man stood polishing a dagger with the corner of his handkerchief in the wash of summer sunlight through the window, the points of his green linen doublet edged with lace. Young and clean-shaven, he had a rich man's air. The seal of a nobleman hung from a gold chain about his neck.

"Well," said Thomas Howe, the arl of Amaranthine's eldest son. "What a surprise."


	6. Chapter 6

**title:** "The Affair of the Stolen Dagger, Part 6."

**characters:** Soris, f!Tabris

**rating/warnings**: public corporal punishment

**summary:** The end of our tale.

8

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><p>8<p>

Thomas Howe had a curious demeanour, a brittle sort of self-possession. A corpse lay on the floor behind him, the bowel-stink of death already beginning to waft from his clothes. _The Tevinter_, Soris guessed, not daring to take his eyes from the dagger in Howe's hand. Fear chilled him all the way to the bone. Couldry's men were outside, but if Howe were here...

"Well," the young shem noble said again, drawing out the single syllable. His eyebrows lifted in exaggerated disgust. A muscle jumped in his cheek, like a bowstring drawn and quivering. "An elf?"

_Stay calm, Soris_, he told himself. _What would Kallian do?_

Kallian would be bold. Kallian would be _brazen_. As though she stood behind his shoulder, close enough to blow hot breath on the nape of his neck, he heard her wry, mocking voice. _You can only die once, Cuz, and there's enough right here to send you to the hangman. What else are you afraid of?_

"I suppose," Soris said, making his words come careful and precise, calm despite the nerves that wanted to jitter his spine, "you're here for the same thing that the Tevinter wanted." He swallowed around the knot in his throat, deliberately relaxing the muscles of his shoulders, and raised his chin to meet the nobleman's eyes. "The price is the same." A measured pause. "My lord."

Soris had heard that the eldest Howe scion was a sot, twenty years old and intent on drinking himself into a grave before he was thirty, but he looked sober enough here and now. A stupid nobleman - or one very sure of himself - to kill a man in broad daylight, in an inn where his presence would surely be marked. He supposed Couldry couldn't have been expected to be able to stop an arl's son from going wherever he liked - always assuming Couldry hadn't been the one to tell Howe where he could find the dagger in the first place.

"Price?" Howe snorted. "I should have you thrashed for insolence. Give me the dagger, boy, or I'll see to it you hang for sure."

The arl's son was the kind who'd see him hang anyway, out of spite. Soris tried not to think too hard about that. He bared his teeth, slipping his right hand behind his back like a man reaching for his knife. "They can only hang me once." _Play the role, Soris_, he told himself, and forced himself to continue: "What's to stop me killing _you_, my lord, and taking my pay from your corpse?" _Be cold. You're somebody dangerous, and you know you can take him._ "I don't know why you want this little dagger, but I know you want it. Five sovereigns, my lord, and we both walk out of here happy."

A suspicious pallor was spreading into Thomas Howe's cheeks. "Four sovereigns," the young man said, the faintest of wavers in the last syllable.

_Young Lord Tom doesn't want to die either_. A flicker of satisfaction flared in his breast. He might get away with this after all. "Five," Soris said firmly. "I'm not here to haggle." At least, he hoped he wasn't. Every instant he remained here - standing, not running - made him want to scream with fear and tension. A half-familiar sound tugged at the edges of his awareness, distant, like rain on a tin roof, but it made his guts turn over like the memory of a nightmare.

"Five, then, damn you for a knife-eared usurer!" Howe fumbled a purse from his belt and emptied the contents onto the tabletop. Soris caught the glitter of gold. "Now give it here!"

By his expression, Howe had to be nearly as nervous as Soris. Keeping his eyes on the shem, Soris closed his palm around the coins and drew the package from under his shirt. The sound was closer now. Abruptly he remembered where he'd heard it before. He flung the string-wrapped package at Howe's head - "All yours, my lord!" - and bolted for the door. He had a brief glimpse of the shem's features, distorted in outrage, and then the door swung shut behind him.

Let Lord Thomas explain himself to the templars, if he wished. Soris had no intentions of being anywhere in the vicinity when the source of that sound - marching feet and the distant jingle of chainmail - arrived.

8

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><p>8<p>

He never found out what happened to the dagger, or why Howe had wanted it so badly. The young lord must have avoided the templars, because there wasn't the slightest whisper of a scandal... and after a couple of weeks, the Chantry called off the search, content to pressure the Crown for higher tariffs and tighter scrutiny of Tevinter merchants trading in Denerim. Two Circle mages died in suspicious circumstances when called to the court to attend the Queen for an illness, but that on its own could hardly be accounted proof of anything in particular: mages weren't quite as despised as elves, but they _were_ feared. _More than enough people_, as Kallian said to him weeks later, upon hearing the gossip, _would stick a knife in their backs just on general principle. Lucky them, huh?_ Then she shrugged and flinched where the motion pulled the still-healing scars across her shoulders.

Kallian...

_I owe Herrian_, she'd said, that night in the dark. Whatever debt or bargain ran between them must go both ways, for the big sergeant sought Soris out to tell him when the magistrate passed sentence upon his cousin. "If you have some silver," he said, soft - looming like a threatening stormcloud in the shadow of the alienage gate, hard of mien and with a brutal grip on Soris's shoulder for the benefit of passers-by - "I can slip it to Deke and get him to go easy with the cat."

"Not much." Soris swallowed, thinking of the four sovereigns left after Couldry took his cut, hidden - without his knowledge - under Cyrion Tabris' hearthstone. He'd found another two sovereigns' worth of assorted small coin there, undoubtedly fruit of Kallian's dangerous audacity. Money that would have to last while she healed. "I can raise a little."

Sunlight washed the colours of the tattered embroidery device on the sergeant's tabard, showing up pale stains that cleaning couldn't shift. Soris looked up at the big shem, a little surprised to find himself unafraid for his own safety. Wary, perhaps: always that. But not afraid.

Not for himself.

"Your cousin's tough, lad," the sergeant said, when he hesitated. "She'll come through. And," a narrow, crooked quirk about the mouth, "I'll make sure they don't cripple her."

8

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><p>8<p>

He was in the market crowd, Shianni pale - and for once, silent - at his side, when the guards brought her out of the gaol, stripped the shirt from her back, and bound her hands to the tailgate of a one-mule cart. An overcast morning, a grey sun lurking behind the low haze of cloud: the leanness of hunger made her looked frail and slender despite the ridged muscle of her shoulders and the white lines of old scars that criss-crossed her arms and marked her naked flanks. She held herself with a quiet, unflinching kind of courage, painfully upright. He saw her exchange words with the guardsman detailed to lead the cart, lips quirked into a wry half-grin. Then the shem slapped the mule on its haunches and the cart squealed, juddering, into motion.

He was glad Cyrion hadn't come. The old man had elected to stay home, unable to face the sight of his only daughter being whipped at the cart's tail. It hurt _Soris's_ heart to witness, but if Kallian could endure it, then he would not look away.

The crowd that had turned out to see a flogging - not, of course, as entertaining as a hanging, despite the presence of the public executioner, but worth watching nonetheless - shoved and jostled, laying bets on whether his cousin would last to the alienage gate without fainting and being dragged through the muck, as knotted nine-tailed rope slapped into Kallian's back again and again, and blood ran from lacerated flesh to drip into the mud. Through it all, she did not cry out, only the tightening lines around her eyes and the occasional stagger when the cart lurched over a pothole revealing that she felt any pain at all. The mule, inured to its role in the proceedings, barely flapped an ear.

The public executioner was responsible for public whippings, a weather-beaten human man in his late middle-age. He drew out the process with all the brutal theatricality of his trade. By the time the cart reached the alienage gate, more than half an hour had passed, and the crowd - all but the gamblers - had begun to drift away.

There were very few elves around. Humans were dangerous around the sight of blood. But Pol was waiting at the gate, and Tam, and a handful of the older, harder men of the alienage - the kind of men who set upon unwary shems in alleyways in the dark of night to relieve them of their coin, and left no witnesses behind.

The cart shuddered to a halt. The public executioner tossed the cat in the cartbed and cut Kallian loose. She braced herself on her hands, head bowed, against the cart's boards for a moment. Only a moment: only the space of a long inhaled breath. Then she lifted her head and met Soris's gaze through the ring of guardsmen that surrounded her; straightened, with stark, agonising dignity, to cross the ten yards that separated them.

Soris caught her as she staggered, careful of her injuries. Blood dripped hot and sticky from her shoulders onto his shirt. "Cousin..."

"Don't let the bastards see me fall," Kallian Tabris gritted through clenched teeth, grim eyes watching the crowd and the mule cart now creaking back towards the prison. "I don't want to give them the _satisfaction_."

The other elves closed in around them, blocking them from the shems' view. Shianni, unwontedly subdued, slid under Kallian's other arm. Soris supported his cousin with gentle arms, and met Shianni's hot, angry stare across the red ruin of Kallian's back. The flies were already buzzing. "Easy," he said, soft. "We'll get you home."

8

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><p>8<p>

Years later, in cold and desperate places, he would hold to the memory of her stark determination. It would give him the strength to find courage and endurance of his own.

8

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><p>8<p>

Her wounds healed, though the scars remained. She paid a journeyman carpenter to take him on and teach him the skills of the trade - half the dagger's value for his education, though as an elf he'd never be a guild apprentice. Cyrion watched her with worry and not a little disappointment, and Soris could not bring himself to think well of his uncle for his wordless reproach.

Shianni, she paid a dressmaker to take into trade, over his younger cousin's protests that she could - and would - find her own way: not the first time he'd seen Kallian quietly, irresistibly persuasive, but the first time he understood the contrast between it and the terrible capacity for violence that waited behind her patient eyes.

It unsettled him.

Kallian would seek him out from time to time, in the red glow of sunset or the pale light of dawn, battered and bruised, reeking of blood or sweat, with a cold bleakness in her gaze. He never asked what she'd been doing. Sometimes she told him. More often she didn't, and they would sit in silence, shoulders touching; or he would talk of small things, of painless gossip or the grain of wood, while she watched him, dark and coiled and patient.

Sometimes he dreamed of the apostate woman's dying, blood on his hands and the stench of bowels voiding in death. That, he did not speak of, and in time the dreams came less often.

When Valendrian announced her engagement to a boy of good family from the Highever alienage, Soris saw his hard-eyed, feral cousin smile politely in public, and in private come home bleeding. Those wounds she would not speak of, except to ask his help in binding, and he watched the darkness in her eyes grow in line with the scars on her skin. Like a rat in a trap, gnawing at its own limbs.

But there was no way out. Not for her, not for him, not for any of them. The world was what it was, and always would be.

All they can do is endure.

8

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><p>8<p>

_Where they died, there the road ended  
>and ends still and when I take down<br>the map of this island, it is never so…_

_...the line which says woodland and cries hunger  
>and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,<br>and finds no horizon_

_will not be there._

_-Eavan Boland, "That The Science of Cartography Is Limited"_

Fin.

* * *

><p>8<p>

AN: For those interested, to be "whipped at the cart's tail" was a common punishment for vagrancy and petty theft in the middle ages, and remained in use for other crimes (including "interfering with a young woman") right up until the end of the nineteenth century in Europe and the Americas. It was usually, though not always, carried out by the hangman. This is a depiction of one instance involving petty theft from the eighteenth century (sorry for the long link):

.org/collectionimages/AN00279/AN00279197_001_

(In England in 1530, Henry VIII legislated that vagrants be whipped naked; Elizabeth I amended this so that they were only stripped to the waist. The history of punishment is really rather sickening, if you look at it.)

Anyway, this is it for "The Affair of the Stolen Dagger," and - alas! - I'll probably go back to being Not Here in the forthcoming months. Let me know if you had fun reading.


End file.
